As a Feather
by OakwoodOuroboros
Summary: Atsushi has a problem. Nobody had noticed until then, maybe because of the fact that he wasn't someone noticeable in the first place. But when one day En walks in on him at the wrong time, he realises that he might not be able to keep his secret for much longer. But is it really for the worst, in the end?


**Warning: this fic is about eating disorders (none in particular, I don't want to diagnose something wrongly). Please feel free to leave comments on the portrayal of these illnesses: I did my research, but if I seem offensive or unrealistic in any way, I would like to know in how so that I can correct it.**

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Not much was to be said about the bathrooms at Binan High school. White tiles, white sinks, white stalls and white bog rolls. Normal, if not slightly on the classy side. Still, that wasn't the most interesting thing right now.

En sighed when at last he felt his bladder going from "bursting" through "not-so-full", to at last end at "empty". It must be the best joy known to man, he reflected, pulling his zip up and walking over to the line of blinding sinks. Of course, sitting for hours on end in the bathhouse was, to him at least, the next best thing in the world, but still... Some stuff couldn't compare.

It had been at the end of lunch break that he had excused himself and ran down from the club room in order to answer the call of nature, and as such the bathrooms should have been empty after the rush that there generally was right after the bell rang. Even Gero, a person that was very likely to stay hours in front of a mirror at any given occasion, was nowhere to be seen as En had rushed into the room. So it was with a certain amount of surprise that when the automatic tap stopped flowing and the sound of running water had given way to silence, that he heard the retching.

It was very discreet, and sounded like it was being held back, as if whoever was doing so didn't want to be heard, but it was worrying nonetheless. The sound had come from the furthest stall along the row, and En, being a rather kind if not lazy individual at heart, decided that it was best to go and check on whatever was happening.

His curled finger rapped smartly on the door (which, going by the small red dot showing through the keyhole, was indeed locked and occupied), and he let a few words drop in what he hoped was a reassuring voice.

"Hey, you all right in there? Need to go to the nurse's office?"

No reply.

"I can't go if you're ill," En sighed, "just come out so that I know that you haven't fainted or something."

Still no reply.

"Right, you can't say that you haven't been warned. I'm coming over!"

Stepping into the stall next door, he was preparing himself to resorting to the old technique of standing up on the toilet lid to take a peak over the partition. He was faced with a dilemma, though: would the seats he had had no problems scrambling up on when he was a kid still take his now consequent weight?

He was about to find out -for the better or for worse, we will never know- when he caught a few words whispered in a feeble voice.

"Go away."

En halted, as if struck. This voice was the very one he had heard daily over the last few years, the one that would reply to his stupid comments and entertain maybe-not-entirely-sane conversations relating to the place of chikuwabu in the food taste scale. This was the voice of a person he valued as a friend, as a minder when he got too childish, as an occasional love interest (seriously, since he had started hanging out at the bathhouse he had not actually seen a single girl. He sometimes wondered whether the animators just didn't know how to draw them.). This was Atsushi's voice.

Yet it wasn't.

Had he ever heard him sound so weak? Defeated? Scared, even? Of course, the handful of words caught from under stall partitions did nothing to deter him, as they were originally intended to. No, instead of this he rounded the corner to get to the closed stall's door again, and banged on it heavily with his fist.

"ATSUSHI! I promise that I WILL break this door down if you do not come out of there this INSTANT!"

Such a hypocrite, his mind then decided to drop, you thought that it was him acting out of character, but look at you. Who would've thought you could get this worked up?

He ignored this, focusing on making his threats of destroying school property more and more real as he started slamming a shoulder over and into the metal door. He stopped pretty quickly though, surprised when he saw the little red dot turn green as the door was unlocked from the inside.

He went silent. Gulping down the knot that had formed in his throat, he reached for the handle and gently pulled the door open.

Inside, Atsushi was sitting on the floor, looking down at the toes of his shoes. He trembled slightly, even though the air was far from cold. Toilet paper was strewn everywhere around him, either unrolled on the floor, or in large, scrunched up piles. The place was otherwise pristine, and the toilet seat was closed.

Something was up.

"Atsushi, are you all right there? You sick or something?"

He didn't reply again, only pulling his knees closer to his chest and letting his gaze slip off to the side. En quirked an eyebrow, unsure of what to do, but seeing as his friend wasn't responding to any of his questions, he decided to find out for himself. He reached out to the toilet seat. He intended to flip it open, just to make sure he hadn't imagined those retching sounds, but suddenly Atsushi's hand shot out and slammed down on the heavy plastic cover. He had finally snapped his eyes up to En's, but what he saw there was something that he had ever seen in the serious student. They were too wide, pupils tiny and letting the sclera show all the way around his iris. He was terrified, in some instinctive, desperate, wild and animalistic way. A deer in headlights. And a guilty one, by the looks of things.

Slowly, En took a seat next to Atsushi. It felt a little cliché, and to tell the truth slightly déjà vu. But still. He couldn't think of anything better to do. As he had said before, it was out of the question that he would leave him alone, not until he offered up some sort of explanation.

They stayed there for a while. The bell for that first period of that afternoon sang it's shrill song, quickly joined by the pounding of student's feet throughout the building. Atsushi twitched a little, instinctively, his habits as a good student deeply ingrained into him. But in the end, he didn't move.

The silence fell back again, like a heavy cloak over the small, cramped space that was the bathroom stall meant only for one person. After what seemed like hours, Atsushi sighed and fidgeted a little where he sat. En didn't have to wait long before he piped up, in a low voice barely above a whisper.

"Would you believe me if I told you that I'm fine?"

The answer was immediate.

"No."

"Right."

Their gazes met again, separated solely by the lenses of Atsushi's glasses. He looked calmer than before, but En nearly wished that this wasn't the case. The usually bright brown eyes that he knew so well looked dull. Defeated. As if he had nothing to fight for anymore.

But no, despite this, he needed an answer. Whatever was troubling Atsushi, he would bear the weight of as well.

"Please, tell me what's wrong."

The Piercing Prince sighed again, picking at a piece of toilet paper that was hanging around.

"Can we talk about it in the club room?"

En thought it over for a second, then nodded. He knew that his friend was trying to put off whatever he had to say, but he accepted the condition easily. He was the one who wasn't well; he had the right to decide where he was the most comfortable to talk. And he had to agree that the hard tiled floor was not the best of places to discuss such important matters.

En got up and stuck a hand out to help Atsushi to his feet. He took it gratefully and was pulled up with surprisingly little effort, as he had always been. Or had it always been that way? He was unsure, it had sort of become part of him, as much as his glasses.

He started picking up the toilet paper, some of it he tried to scrunch up in a certain way so as to mask the colour of what had been mopped up with them, but the taller teen was not fooled. The greenish-brown, and sometimes alarmingly red sludge stood out all too brightly against the impeccable white surroundings, even as his friend attempted to stuff it all in the small bathroom bin. He didn't dump it down the toilet, the seat not even being touched during the whole process. Just before leaving the stall, and still under En's watchful eye, he pressed the flush button.

Like a man to be hanged he walked over to the sinks and washed his hands. He didn't stop there though. He pushed his glasses to rest on the top of his head, then cupped his hands under the stream of clear liquid gushing from the tap to at last take the water in his mouth and spit it out again. He repeated this three times, on the fourth go slapping the contents of his palms onto his face. After drying up as much as possible with the paper towels provided, he brought the spectacles to rest back on top of his nose.

En led the way out the bathroom and through the empty corridors. It was very strange, he found, eavesdropping unwillingly on lessons he should have been sleeping off. They got to a staircase after a while, and they clambered up several floors to at last find themselves facing the not-really-doing-much club's door. As could be expected, it was empty, even Wombat having had to drag his flesh puppet off to some lesson or another (Tawarayama still was a teacher after all, even though his lessons now made even less sense than they ever had before. People just assumed that he was slowly turning senile.). They both took a seat opposite each other.

Atsushi seemed slightly pale under the light of the overcast weather outside. If he hadn't had the reaction he had earlier on, En would have just brought him over to the nurse's office without question. But no. This was something far more serious, he could sense it in the atmosphere. An elephant in the room.

"So," he started off, "tell me why you disappear off somewhere every other lunchtime."

His friend shuffled in his seat. "I go to the bathroom."

"You know what I mean. There are bathrooms closer to the clubroom, why take the effort to go so far?" The question was rhetorical; he knew that it was not to bump into any of them. Yet, he felt that hearing it from Atsushi's lips would bring on the rest of the story far easier if he did so.

"How about you?" he threw back defensively, "If that's the reason why you've made me miss several hours of lessons, I don't see the point."

"Kinugawa, stop dancing around the subject, and spit whatever the matter's with you out NOW!" En shouted in one of his rare fits of rage. His friend flinched and looked at him, shocked, the same hunted animal's expression back on his face as he had seen earlier on.

"Sorry," the blue-eyed teen said in a softer tone, scratching the back of his neck in unease. "I went there because it was the closest one to my classroom for next, well, _this_ period. And also, you know… I'm concerned about you, that's all."

A slight blush tinged his cheeks at the cheesiness of it all, before adding hurriedly : "But I'm sure that Yumoto, Ryuu and Io would agree with me, if they knew. And Wombat. We're your friends, we wouldn't judge you, whatever it is."

Atsushi's gaze flickered around nervously. He was unsure, stuck in a choice he would rather not make. En caught on this, thinking up the last few words that wold finally sway the young man.

"Or you can just tell me. I can keep a secret from the others if needed."

Atsushi snapped to attention. There was still conflict in his eyes, but determination could be seen nonetheless. He opened his mouth, hesitated, took his glasses off and concentrated on polishing them. Seeing him without them was a little unnerving, and revealed dark bags that En hadn't noticed before, even when he shed the accessory at the baths.

He dragged the cloth of his uniform shirt over the lenses in small circles, and started talking unexpectedly while doing so. His voice was a little high pitched and he stuttered on certain words, but it was way more comprehensible than the raspy whisper he had used in the bathrooms earlier on.

"I… Well I think that the best way to start is, well… You remember that time we went on a trip to that weird beach? Or the time we fought against the hikikomori monster?"

En nodded, but Atsushi did not look up and continued talking, his scrubbing getting more and more ferocious as the words fell from his mouth in a now hurried stream.

"I… You may not, but I remember every single time you stopped me from falling or picked me up, you would say that I was too light or too skinny. I mean, it's not exactly that I _look_ that way, I think that even Io is thinner than me when it comes to appearance alone." He took a deep breath. "B…But I… I don't think that you could say that I eat well. I don't like eating. At all. Most things in my mouth taste pasty and plain disgusting, and I loathe the feeling of anything in my stomach, and sometimes I…" His voice hitched again, a hiccup violent enough to startle En from his concentrated state. "S…Somet…times I can't… no… I _don't want_ to keep it down. It's too much, and… just, I…I know that it's weird, but… it adds to the stress of it all. It's a kind of relief to have it gone…"

He was now being incredibly violent with his eyewear, and had gone off into an inaudible rant. En reached across the table, clasping the aggressive hand and the accessory as he did so. This also stopped Atsushi's muttering. His eyes had snapped up to meet his icy blue ones, barely a few inches away from his own, unreadable. The atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife as En's larger hand held Atsushi's, the latter's trembling in his grip.

With a sigh, he took the glasses away from the one who had treated them so harshly. He checked them for damage before placing them delicately back on the boy's nose. He sat back down slowly, slouching in the chair as he usually did.

"I'd better show you, then. I swear that I will find you something that you can stomach, and work up from there. Try to get you to appreciate food. Because, seriously," he told him, a small blush darkening his cheekbones, "I don't like to think that I'm holding a bag of feathers every time I hold you. Besides, it's not healthy."

Atsushi didn't know what to say. He was… accepting? He hadn't expected this in the slightest, he had thought that as soon as he knew, he would call his parents, his friends, and they would all stare at him in pity or curiosity. He was a guy, he wasn't supposed to be the kind of person to suffer from such a… disability. But En… he was going to try and take him on, discreetly. Try and keep this from common knowledge, while slowly making sure that he would get better. That alone was so much more than what he would have ever hoped for. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, but they didn't spill. Maybe he would get through this, maybe the crushing guilt he felt every time he had to lie and cover his situation up would disappear. Maybe… nothing was sure, but it was a start.

His slightly watery smile illuminated the room, En thought, as he yet again offered him a hand up.

"Do you fancy a curry, then?" he said, and Atsushi laughed, catching his outstretched palm, and thinking that yes, things were going to be looking up from now on.

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 **Image courtesy of FreyaSkuldAnastasia. And I don't own BKCBbL!**

 **Many thanks to the novel "Anouk" by Pierre Bottero. Very good book about anorexia and peer pressure, which unfortunately I don't think has been translated into English. Yet. Who knows, one day maybe French multi-genre authors will be recognised in the English-speaking community.**

 **Note on suffixes : Yeah, I don't like adding –sensei, -sempai, -chan and all that crap after character's names. Reasons being that first off, I don't know what half of them mean, and secondly because when they are used in an English text they sound incredibly annoying and obnoxious. Or cute-girly. Ok, I know it's supposed to be set in Japan, but that's just me.**

 **Also! This fic only treats the subject rather lightly, as in there are no huge fainting fits, and the illness (that, I remind you, I will not put a name on) is caught in it's early stages and hasn't become too severe. I can't help but critique the way fics (or even novels in general, including the previously mentioned "Anouk") rely a lot on the shock factor of worse case scenarios. I'm not claiming that these things don't happen, because they do, but they are possible to prevent. I think. I hope.**

 **Oh yes, if you find yourself in a similar situation to En's in this fic, I recommend you don't follow his example and go to a specialist, or an adult if you're too young. Dealing with an ill person alone is possible, but it's still better to get help in most situations.**

 **On another note, I left the romance part sort of ambiguous because, well, that's how it's supposed to be. And as I have said on many occasions before, I am incapable of writing for that genre, unless it's reeeeaaallly light and more on the humoristic side rather than the lovey-dovey one. Fluff is good though. Fluff is always good.**

 **Anyways, hope you enjoyed, have a good day!**


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